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Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, died at 87 on Apr. 8. Whether you agreed with her politics or not, you’ll get a kick out of these lesser-known facts about the Iron Lady.

True story: Margaret Thatcher may have helped invent soft-serve ice cream. After she graduated from the University of Oxford with a chemistry degree, she worked as a research chemist at a Hammersmith food manufacturer called J. Lyons and Company, and was part of a team tasked with “whipping more air into ice cream.” They came up with a kind of “soft ice cream” that used fewer ingredients and saved money on production costs.

That being said, she was later dubbed the “the milk snatcher” for discontinuing a free milk program for schoolchildren ages 7-11 in the 1970s.

Following a jam-packed beta test and a jaw-dropping $4.2 million seed round, Ark people search is open for sign ups…at least for the next three days. Ark lets you sift through profiles on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other services to help you find out which of your high school classmates live in New York, see which friends are single, and connect with strangers who share your interests by layering up to 30 characteristic filters.

The problem of too much social data and too little discoverability is so widespread that Facebook even discussed a possible acquisition of Ark. But instead its PhD founders decided to see how far they can ride their cute penguin logo. Soon it will launch native mobile apps with some of most useful push notifications I’ve seen. And as part of its limited launch today at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, Ark is accepting new users at

In an effort to streamline its digital offerings, The Weather Channel has today announced that its popular iPhone app has undergone a major redesign. It started with the launch of the iPad app, and just a few weeks ago The Weather Channel followed suit on the web. But the iPhone marks a major portal between TWC and its consumers, in that mobile and weather undoubtedly go hand in hand.

The redesign reminds me a bit of HTC’s Sense 3, with the home screen offering up a weather-themed background based on the weather outside. The user interface seems much more navigable, but the features themselves are getting a bump as well.

The revamp streamlines the TWC app in a big way, in that you can have as much or as little weather as you’d like when you hop in the app. You’ll obviously get automatic weather updates, but the ability…

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A rout in raw materials has helped drive down holdings in a Carlye Group firm’s flagship fund from about $2 billion to less than $50 million. The collapsing commodities market is spreading pain well beyond specialists to some of the heaviest hitters on Wall Street.